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BOMBSHELL: The Obama Spying Scandal Started Long Before Trump

Remember the Iran Deal negotiations? In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama administration used the NSA to cast a wide net of surveillance around not just Israeli officials and diplomats, but American lawmakers who were friendly towards Israel as well as Jewish-American groups.

White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. ‘We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ a senior U.S. official said. ‘We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’

Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts.

In other words, the Obama White House used Israel as an excuse to collect classified information on its political opponents via the NSA and then leak bits of this information to the news media in an effort to intimidate them. Smith writes.

‘At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,’ says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. ‘The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.’

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- Robert J. Hanlon.

“There is a deeply anti-democratic undercurrent to much of the criticism of the new president, borne aloft by an assumption that democracy is too important to be left to the voters.”

And if a statue can oppress you, then I submit that you have greater issues. - A West.